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The $1.96 billion Caltrain electrification project came to a screeching halt on Friday, Feb. 17, after it was announced that Federal Transit Administration officials were holding back grant funding needed with only days before construction was to begin.
The $647 million grant request from Caltrain could still win federal approval down the line, but Federal Transit Administration (FTA) officials are reportedly telling local officials that the request must be added to President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget.
At the very least, it amounts to a delay; at worst, it could mean the project is scrapped, said Seamus Murphy, spokesman for the Caltrain electrification project.
“Under normal circumstances this should have been easy, but now we don’t know if federal funding will be there,” he said. “If we don’t have access to the federal funds, then we won’t have a Caltrain electrification project.”
FTA representatives could not be reached for immediate comment.
If the political climate were different, Caltrain officials say their funding request would have been a shoo-in for approval. FTA officials gave the electrification project medium-high ratings in a July review, which normally would have guaranteed approval. Of the dozens of grants awarded through the FTA capital investment program, Murphy said it is unprecedented for a project that met all the requirements to be deferred like this.
But even before the FTA announcement, the rail electrification upgrades seemed to be barreling toward political danger. Earlier this month, it was revealed that California’s Congressional Republican delegation sought to block the Caltrain electrification funding as a way to also stymie the state’s $64-billion high-speed rail project. That coalition of 14 representatives sent a Jan. 24 letter to new Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, urging her not to sign off on the grant.
In a statement issued Friday afternoon, Rep. Anna Eshoo denounced the delay as a political maneuver, pledging to try to get funding approval before next month.
“I never imagined that the electrification of a train would be subjected to such brutal, partisan politics,” she said in her statement. “The only requirement this didn’t meet was a political one.”
Caltrain officials say they have been scrambling since first learning Friday morning that the federal portion of the $1.96 billion project was being held back. Losing out on that money throws into jeopardy the project’s two main contracts with Stadler Rail AG and Balfour Beatty. In those contracts, Caltrain officials had committed themselves to a March 1 deadline to give the go-ahead for construction. It is still unclear what it would mean if Caltrain misses that deadline, Murphy said.
“We’re evaluating our options and determining how long we can extend that deadline,” Murphy said. He declined to elaborate on any options being considered.
Caltrain has already spent $150 million on design and preliminary construction to prepare for electrification to begin this year. As of now, the project is described as “shovel ready” and capable of providing thousands of jobs across the country.
Originally pitched more than 15 years ago, the project to electrify the Peninsula rail corridor would be a dramatic upgrade to a transit system used by more than 47,000 daily riders on average. The existing 51-mile Caltrain line stretching from San Jose to San Francisco is running at full capacity with diesel-powered engines that have been outpaced by newer technologies. A new electrified system could reportedly run about 20 percent more trains and eventually reduce up to 97 percent of emissions.
This is what we get for having sanctuary cities. Great job everybody. I guess California can look forward to more of this for the next four to eight years.
I see your “common-sense liberal” values involve blaming California for the Federal government deciding not to fund national infrastructure projects as political retaliation.
Trump is getting back at all the states that voted against him. It’s not just California.
I’ve come to realize that the angry, lonely, sad, spiteful folk who I’ve seen on the internet over the past 8 years, and who claimed to be angry and sad about Obama being in office, are still angry and spiteful and lashing out.
It doesn’t have anything to do with politics. Some people are just like that and politics is the vessel they use to vent their ongoing frustrated state in life. It’s about them as people, not politics. You know they type, click on their FB profile. They’ll most likely be older single men. Sad and lonely and angry that others lives that, to them, internally, seem so care free and enjoyable. Keep living your happy lives people. There is no fixing the terminally bitter.
After approving funding from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) for Caltrain’s “modernization program”, the LA Times published an article revealing that former FTA Administrator Carolyn Flowers, has suddenly been employed by AECOM, a major vendor to Caltrain. AECOM has a financial interest in the “modernization” project, which the grant will fund. This is conflict of interest to the max. See http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-federal-rail-grant-conflict-20170209-story.html
LOL “conflict of interest to the max” cried the trump voter, unironicslly. Uh huh.
Regardless of your views on Trump, it reeks of corruption when a federal official approves a grant then takes a job with one of the beneficiaries of said grant. At the very least, Flowers should be dismissed and AECOM should be disqualified from working on the project. How is any of this Trump’s fault? Flowers was an Obama appointee.
If California can afford to support sanctuary cities, it certainly can support this Caltrain electrification without federal fund.
That’s probably the dumbest remark I’ve seen here. Sanctuary cities actually cost less because we don’t spend our local funds enforcing federal immigration policy. If the federal government wants to enforce it, they can, and being a sanctuary city doesn’t stop them from doing so. All it says is that if, say, a domestic abuse victim goes to the police, they won’t be checking that person’s immigration status. Good policy to keep our neighborhoods safe.
On top of that, California is a donor state, so we give more money to the federal government than we get in return. We could easily pay for this ourselves if we weren’t supporting all the Trump states benefitting from out hard work.
Why should tax payers in the whole nation be paying for electrifying a small stretch of track in California? Why does it cost $2,000,000,000 to electrify something like 60 miles of track, that’s $33 million per mile (yes, I realize this includes trains), but it’s still insane.
I’m glad so much money is not being wasted. This should be paid for by Caltrain users via ticket revenues, or it cities want to chip in to electrify it, that’s fine, pass some propositions or parcel taxes, but don’t tax the whole country for it.
Taxpayers all over the country wouldn’t be paying for it. It’s Californians’ money that we remit to the federal government. For every dollar we send to DC, we get back less than a dollar in investment. We’re subsidizing the Trump states, it’s simple math. Now, since they’re mad we didn’t vote for Dear Leader, they’re going to withhold money for our infrastructure.
Please explain your accounting. I am not saying that I’m an expert, but if it is Federal Funds, it comes from Federal Taxes. State funding comes from state taxes. As far as I’m aware, the Feds don’t tag Federal taxes from where they original from and proportionally allocate those back to each state.
They hypocrisy of people here in CA is that they don’t want to follow Federal rules, but still want Federal money. Liberals are like kids who don’t respect the curfew, don’t get good grades, but demand an iPhone and BMW for their birthdays. If you don’t follow the Fed’s rules, why the h*** do you expect them to keep funding your projects? It’s ridiculous.
Of course they don’t allocate them proportionally, that’s my entire point!
We Californians work so hard and produce so much wealth and value that if we were a country of our own, we’d be the sixth largest economy. The Trump states just don’t work as hard and want handouts from us, and now that they’re in control of the federal government they want to tank our infrastructure projects as political revenge.
It’s not just liberals, that’s the nature of federal/state tax interaction. The feds take away local money and throw it in the national slush fund, then the people that they took it away from fight each other for who gets to spend it on their local boondoggle projects – the more boondoggles, the more odds of getting _some_ money. It’s a recipe for driving up spending.
If it was up to me, there’d be no federal taxes and no federal benefits, leave politics local, since it’s such a dirty, corrupt business.
@@@@Resident:
I love all the @’s. Anyhow, you are being incredibly unfair to “red” states. CA doesn’t exist in vacuum, and our economy is as large as it is because we import a huge amount of goods and labor into this state, much of it from “red” states – it’s the economic principle of comparative advantage. What about the “red” Californians, which is most of the state geographically? Are they lazy handout seekers too?
Imagine what would happen to Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and CA’s agriculture if we stopped trading with those red states. It wouldn’t be good.
I think the Trump states might disagree with you on the benefits of free trade 😉
You’re making an excellent argument for why they shouldn’t be killing our infrastructure for political payback! Glad we could find some agreement here.
They are killing the funding for our infrastructure, not the infrastructure. We’re losing out on getting back some amount of the money taken from CA by the feds, but we’re also not taking the money of 49 other states to pay more than $30 million per mile for some power lines! I live in Mountain View, near the tracks. I would love to see electric trains here, however, I can’t accept paying ridiculous amounts of money for this project, especially if tax payers are fleeced for it. My point is that such projects should be funded primarily by their beneficiaries (which may include local people who want to subsidize the thing in order to have the pollution emitted elsewhere).
Since we’re a donor state, we wouldn’t be taking any money from other states. It’s all our money that we would be able to use to pay for our own projects if we weren’t subsidizing the Trump states that can’t pay for their stuff themselves.
So where will they existing taxpayer money go?
@Robyn:
The government is running massive deficits. The money would go towards not making the deficit $2 billion bigger. We’re in an unsustainable spending situation right now, it will end when the US cuts spending, or when the dollar collapses. One of those two must happen.
Hey Folks, the electrification was tied to the high speed rail project and that is a total boondoggle. Although I wish for CAL-TRAIN to be electrified, I hope its cancelled. We should be spending the money on what is most important now and that is LEVY, BRIDGES, and DAM spillway upgrades. Unfortunately, the state is piss pour at maintaining our infrastructure; the powers that be never spend the money when the problems come up but they do seem to be able to borrow more when its a disaster. I’m not a republican but it seems to me the Demos have been running this state into the ground.
Again, if we didn’t have to take care of all the Trump states, we’d have more than enough money to pursue our goals.
Oh, and Oroville dam was passed over for upgrades by Schwarzenegger and George W Bush…
It appears that net tax outflow from California is very small. The state pays $9,086 per capita in federal taxes, and receives $9,040 in federal benefits.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/02/california-federal-taxes-spending-trump
That’s 99.5% of the money coming back. The feds pulled about $370 billion from CA tax payers a couple years ago, which means that if CA didn’t have a net outflow, we’d have about $1.9B available to spend locally. If all of that could go to Caltrain, then CA could pay for the electrification itself – which I doubt is politically possible.
I’m with Tina – fix existing infrastructure.
Caltrain is existing infrastructure. I’m glad we all agree that its electrification should go through and we should improve it!
They have been talking about electrifying CalTrain for over 30 years — not exactly a new idea. How pathetic. As if electrifying it will resolve our traffic congestion. The Bay Area liberals and eco-nuts have prevented real solutions to traffic and congestion. BART is falling apart, though ticket prices continue to climb. Light rail is a joke (a person could walk faster than some of those trains). An express bus route up El Camino? Another boondoggle.
Sorry folks.. the electrification of the Cal Train line is tied to the High Speed Rail nonsense.
No one, NO ONE, wants to take a train to Los Angeles when the ticket will cost the same as a seat on Southwest.. but take four times as long to get there.
Oh please, sign me up for that!
We know we’re going to lose billions in federal funds because of our “sanctuary cities”. Stop complaining if you support SC. And to the poster who feels protecting illegals is cheaper than “wasting” taxpayer funds upholding the laws, what a ridiculous argument. What do you think is the per capita cost of housing, feeding, educating and providing medical care to illegal residents? Of course we have no money for infrastructure. We spend it all on entitlements and CALPERS retirement pensions.
Your comment is spot on.
There is a new sheriff in town.
To paraphrase Obama, Trump gets to say,
“I won, you lost. If you have enough money so a Mexican who sneaks across the border gets free EBT (food), housing, schooling, medical care, and spending money then pay for your own trains.”
I am really enjoying the squealing by the outraged leftists. heh-heh
Yeah, we’re happy to pay for our own trains. As has been pointed out over and over, we’d have plenty of money if we weren’t sending money to the Republican states.
It’s too bad the Republican states in this country need handouts from us, maybe if they worked a little bit harder and took some personal responsibility, they wouldn’t need us to send them welfare.
@Otto Maddox
HST will not take 4hrs, but 2.
Have the future ticket prices been published?
Plenty of people would love to take a HST up & down the coast.
Calling people “eco-nuts” just because they care about environment is not nice, thank you
Up & down the coast??
Posters keep saying that California sends more money to the feds than we get back. Just ain’t so. See Fig. 2 of
https://osc.state.ny.us/reports/budget/2015/fed_budget_fy2013.pdf
and the post by Resident above:
“The state pays $9,086 per capita in federal taxes, and receives $9,040 in federal benefits.”
That was in 2013. Since then Obamacare’s federally paid Medicaid expansion has continued in California. We signed up many more people for Medical so we are undoubtedly getting far more money from the Feds than we pay to them.
Both of those support the fact that we are subsidizing the Republican states. “Deficit” in that document means that we get less back than we pay.
Finally Trump does something right. The train should go underground from station to station and we should build a ped / bike path where the tracks are now. Do it right or don’t do it at all.
LOL!!! Too funny. You’re a good person to explain it to him so politely.
when you drill it down, the Red counties in CA are huge takers of Fed monies, so really it’s really the Blue part of CA that is helping our fellow Americans who cannot seem to help themselves.
You always tell a great story, but I’ve never heard someone in their 50s be so bitter about not getting their parents’ house.
We live in such a mobile world why are we pushing for a electrified track? The the rest of the world has gone mobile. Electric “battery powered” train. Cars bikes phones computers now a train. Tesla can make a 90000kW battery pack train.
What’s really going on here is Jerry Brown wants his legacy high-speed train, and that train will run on electricity. The state doesn’t have enough money to make the portion from San Jose to San Francisco into a high-speed route, but it still needs electrical power to run to San Francisco at conventional speeds. The feds don’t have any more money for high-speed rail, so the state asked for the money for Caltrain electrification (which would eventually be used by the semi-high-speed trains) as a way of getting around that limit.
That didn’t matter to outgoing Federal Transit Administration administrator Carolyn Flowers, who made a last-minute grant of $647 million to the state two days before Trump took over. A few days later, Flowers took a high-paying job with AECOM, a company that has been a major contractor for both Caltrain and the California High Speed Rail Authority. This led the Wall Street Journal to call California’s state capital “America’s western swamp.”
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=12941
Germany has developed a hydrogen fuel cell train. H2 in no pollution out. Basically a clean Electric train carrying it power supply. But no infrastructure changes needed just a H2 station to fill tank.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/12/technology/germany-hydrogen-powered-train/
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The real answer is to support seceding from the the Union. You get to keep your sanctuary cities and will not have to ” send your hard earned dollars ” to our Federal Government. Of course, when ” The Big One ” hits, our Federal government does not owe one thin dime towards your recovery of your ASSets. I know that is no longer an ” if “, it is when. A seamount on the San Andreas Fault has appeared off the Oregon Coastline.
I just read an interesting comment in Forbes about the decaying infrastructure. It goes much farther than that eroding spillway that got ignored for a decade. Most Civil Engineering work has a projective lifespan of 40 years. After that, something better can be installed to replace the failing parts. The failure of #132 PG&E was a deadly example. What I’m upset is that pipeline runs through my parent’s back yard and when the ” Big One ” hits, they will be lucky if the get cremated in our own house.. As for infrastructure, many other states pay their own way. Secession will force California to lose Interstates along with their funding. The Nimitz will become CA 17 again. I can just see where all that extra money will go. The ” Sunshine Express to Santa Cruz will live again! Oh, your State language will be peasant Spanish. Governor ” Moonbeam ” Brown will be the ” Top Boss ” of the new State Of Mexifornia! Adios Muchachos!
Every year, the national debt increases by nearly a trillion dollars. Even more missing money is pledged to future liabilities. The world economy is a house of cards. The federal government has been living on borrowered money and borrowed time.